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CHAPTER 3

CONSTRUCTING BLACK EKURHULENI, 1890-1927

Benoni Pass Office

The rise of the gold mining sector greatly increased the number of Africans residing in Ekurhuleni. Most worked on the mines themselves. Initially their numbers were fairly modest. Only 15 000 Africans were employed on the entire Witwatersrand gold fields in 1890 of which perhaps 5 000 worked in Ekurhuleni. As the deep level mines came into operation, however, these numbers climbed to 69 127 in 1897, and 189 000 in 1912.¹ Most were oscillating migrants who had to be accommodated partly in shanty settlements on mine land, but mainly in compounds. To take one example, in 1895 New Kleinfontein mine expanded its compound so as to accommodate a labour force of 1 200 miners.² Black miners in this period enjoyed considerably more freedom of movement when compared to post-1910 conditions. Rates of desertion stood typically at 7.2%, while New Kleinfontein Company reports in 1897 noted that at any one time 20% of its unskilled labour force was incapacitated by drink.³

After the South African War (1899–1902) the gold mines of the Rand suffered persistent and paralysing shortages of unskilled African labour, largely because of their efforts to reduce the wages they paid to such workers. Wage cuts had been attempted, and failed in 1890, 1896, 1897 and 1900. Finally in 1902 a 50% wage cut was enforced (30 shillings for 30 shifts). This prompted a collective though unorganised withdrawal of African labour from the mines. A low point was reached in July 1906 when only 90 500 African workers were employed on the mines.⁴ Mine owners had insisted as early as 1903 that 197 650 able-bodied African miners were required (a considerable exaggeration) but, however inflated their supposed needs, it was clear that a critical labour shortage was gripping the mines. The mine owners responded in three ways. They increased minimum wages to 50 shillings for 30 shifts; they tried to make living arrangements for their labour marginally more attractive; and they gained permission to import tens of thousands of cheap, indentured Chinese labourers. At their peak the number of Chinese workers rose to 54 000; they were paid at far lower rates and were on longer contracts than African migrant workers (Table 1).⁵

Table 1: Average monthly wage for African and Chinese workers ⁶

Year	Chinese	African
September 1904	-	57s. 0d.
1905–6	39s. 9d.	51s. 11d.
1906–7	41s. 6d.	52s. 3d.
1907–8	44s. 3d.	49s. 1d.

Evidence of their stay can still be seen in the occasional compound dating from that period that still survives today – most noticeably in the form of five-foot bunks, which were far too small to accommodate the average African miner’s frame. These indentured Chinese labourers were repatriated en masse in 1908, and the part that they played in the history of the Witwatersrand and Ekurhuleni has been almost entirely effaced. Yet they fundamentally affected the trajectory of economic development on the Rand, helping the gold mining industry to force down the level of African wages to the level which they had previously sought – and at which they stayed, quite astonishingly, until 1969.⁷

Besides undercutting African wages through importing indentured Chinese, individual mine managers also tried to attract African labour by closing an eye to the sale and consumption of alcoholic liquor (as continued at New Primrose in Germiston at least until 1913),⁸ and by permitting African miners to co-habit with women in clusters of shacks on mine property, which lay largely outside managerial (or any other kind of) control. As J.M. Pritchard of the Native Affairs Department explained:

The principal reason advanced in favour of mine locations is that certain natives, who have worked for long periods on the mines and whose services are particularly valuable, have become married or ‘attached’ to women and if they were not permitted to live with these females in some such place as these locations they would leave the mine. Many such natives, having worked for years on the mines have practically made their homes here and have become skilled labourers.

Such ‘mine locations’ sprang up all along Ekurhuleni, both before and after the South African War of 1899–1902.⁹ The largest were sited immediately adjacent to the main Ekurhuleni towns, and soon came to accommodate large numbers of Africans and coloureds who worked in various capacities in the urban area which they served, and Indian traders who gravitated towards these clumps of population to sell goods. Two key features of these early locations were thus that they formed the nuclei of the permanently settled black urban population of Ekurhuleni, and that they were racially mixed and heterogeneous.¹⁰ The mine locations at both Germiston and Boksburg came into existence before the South African War. In Germiston, Consolidated Goldfields secured permission from the Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek (ZAR) Mining Commissioner to establish a residential area for Asians and Africans on part of the farm Driefontein on the south side of Georgetown which fell inside the municipal area.¹¹ In Boksburg the ZAR government set aside six claims on the farm Vogelfontein belonging to the Hercules Gold Mining Company for the residence of Indians although they made no formal provision for Africans. Nevertheless, blacks and some whites quickly took up residence on this ground upon which 132 self-built structures arose housing 606 people in 1906.¹² In Benoni both Africans and Indians were granted rights to live on a patch of ground owned by the New Kleinfontein Gold Mining Company, known as Kleinfontein or Chimes location, where they erected corrugated iron or unburnt brick-and-thatch houses.¹³ In Springs African and Indians squatted on ground belonging to the government which leased to New State Areas mines.¹⁴ In Brakpan, which only acquired municipal status in 1920, languishing until then under the control of Benoni, African residential arrangements were even more haphazard and ad hoc. Informal mine locations sprang up at Rietfontein Colliery on private stands sub-leased to Jewish traders and on Brakpan Mines. In addition family squatting was widespread on mining land between Brakpan Mine and State Mines (e.g. Withoek and Witpoort Estates).¹⁵

Germiston and Boksburg acquired self-governing, municipal status in 1903, Benoni in 1907 and Springs in 1912.¹⁶ Each took steps to assume control of these haphazard mushroom settlements, most of which were already too small to house the populations they contained, by first taking over these locations in the short term and in the long term by finding new land. Germiston Council found itself immediately frustrated when the mining houses expressed themselves unwilling to sell the ground on which the location stood in Georgetown South and had to content themselves with simply leasing the land on an annual basis. Under this arrangement only four stands for trading were allowed by the mine owners.¹⁷ Boksburg Council was more fortunate. After a fruitless search for new land on which to site a black location which persisted through 1904, it learnt that Hercules Gold Mining Company was willing to permit the establishment of such a settlement 1 kilometre south of the existing black village on Klippoortjie 149. Eventually surface rights over 100 acres were obtained by the Council in this area and the move was accomplished in 1910; 668 men, 549 women and 558 children were moved.¹⁸ This community was subsequently renamed Stirtonville after its first Superintendent, Stirton, who held that position between 1910 and the early 1930s.¹⁹

Chinese labourers

One development which concentrated the minds of several municipalities on the task of securing appropriate land was the passing of the Gold Law in 1908. This prohibited the presence of informal locations on mine land (as well as trading without a licence, which soon caused other problems to be discussed shortly). In Benoni’s case, the Council had searched for an alternative site for the location from the time it assumed office in 1907. Here the New Kleinfontein Gold Mining Company was willing to hand over the land on which the location stood, but the Council rejected the site as being already too small. In 1909, however, the Council’s hand was forced when the Mining Commissioner gave the location’s residents notice to move by the end of the year, in terms of the Gold Law promulgated the year before. After securing a stay of execution the Council then searched somewhat more diligently for an appropriate plot of land. It found it south-west of Benoni on the farm Rietfontein on which it purchased 66 morgen of land – enough for 4 000 people. After legal complications it removed the inhabitants of Chimes location to this site in February 1912.²⁰

In Springs the local authority was faced with fewer problems. The existing location lay on government land, and its population was small. Accordingly, in 1908 it took over formal control of the settlement and tried to shift all blacks living elsewhere in Springs into this area. The latter proved difficult since far more people lived in Springs than in the location itself. From 1916 they embarked on a search for other land but made little progress in the face of non-co-operation from Geduld Proprietary and other nearby mines. Eventually, in 1919 the Springs Mining Commissioner found a satisfactory area of land on Geduld – 77 morgen which could accommodate 1 871 plots. Unlike any of the other Ekurhuleni municipalities, Springs secured a government loan of £25 000 with which it built houses for those removed, a settlement which would eventually be known as Payneville. Unlike anywhere but Alberton location, its plots were a spacious 17 × 17 yards instead of the standard 17 × 8.5.²¹ Finally Alberton location was laid out after the town gained municipal status in 1907. Here again, plots were fairly large. Cass Khayile remembers fig and pear trees growing in his father’s garden. Rosalind Sibeko’s father kept cattle and sheep, while Mrs Nkosi recalls large gardens and big rooms, so much so that when the family was removed ‘our furniture couldn’t fit it’.²² It would remain relatively small for many years.

Germiston’s hand was eventually forced by the Indian traders of Georgetown. In October 1910 a merchant named Kala Singh who had been charged by the Council for doing business illegally in a residential area, won his case on the grounds that the location area had never been formally proclaimed a location (as it was leased to and not owned by the Council). The Council then concluded that it needed to consider clearing the area and obtaining separate residential or trading areas for Africans and Indians. Its trouble deepened when first, the Gold Mining Company, on whose land Georgetown stood, gave six months’ notice for the Council to complete the removal of its residents (to be accomplished by mid-1913) and second, when negotiations then broke down (over price) over the purchase of new land. They were only offered a way out when the Transvaal Provincial Administration agreed to obtain surface rights from Knights Central Gold Mining Company for land on which an African residential area could be laid out. The Council, however, still had the problem of what to do with its Indian traders. The Department of Native Affairs, the Department of the Interior and other government offices all objected to Indians and Africans occupying the same ground, and the Council proved unable to find alternative separate land. Eventually, in the absence of any alternative and with a crisis looming rapidly, a compromise was reached whereby Indians could live on the same site provided that a 67-metre buffer separated the two residential areas. By 1922 this, perhaps predictably, had disappeared. The new site was 30 morgen in extent and 4 kilometres from the centre of town. In June 1913 the African population of this new residential area stood at 2 193, and the Indian population at 675.²³

Benoni’s negotiations over its new location faced the same complication of where to house its Indian population. Not only did Indian traders refuse to move, but the Gold Law prohibited trading on mining ground. The Council negotiated this issue in two ways. It removed the African customers of these Indian traders to the new location, and then offered the traders residence and trading rights, this in open defiance of the law (which, however, was amended in 1913). The new location was then laid out in three parts, one for Africans, one for coloureds and one for Indians.²⁴ The same solution was arrived at, after the 1913 change in the law, in Springs, in whose new location plots 1–384 were reserved for coloureds, plots 385–1 569 for Africans, and the rest for Indians. No compensation was paid to any section of the community, despite extensive protests on their part.²⁵

Types of housing and living arrangements in the new locations would define both the capacity of location superintendents and their administrations to control them, and the general contours of black political assertion, resistance and struggle over the following three decades. Local councils like those which ran Germiston or Benoni were penny-pinching in the extreme, and built negligible numbers of municipal houses for blacks (Springs being one marked exception). The typical pattern of municipal policy across the Ekurhuleni towns was to trim costs by providing serviced plots or stands, upon which stand holders could erect wood-and-iron structures, sometimes aided by loans or low-cost building materials furnished by municipal authorities. As a result, by the early 1930s the ratio of owner to municipally built houses in Ekurhuleni stood at anything from 2 and 12 to 1 (621:326 Springs location; 963:226 Germiston location; 1 026:273 Benoni location).²⁶ This mostly self-built built environment opened up a number of spaces and opportunities which allowed its residents to escape some of the structures of urban control and which served to soften the harsh regimen of black urban life. Firstly, stand holders who had built their houses and paid their stand rent were more difficult for either the council or the government to coerce and control, and this had significant consequences with respect to the independence of black urban women. Widows, for example, along with other women who had been abandoned or divorced, were allowed to hold on to (and perhaps even acquire) stands, which flew in the face of official policy on this matter. By 1930, for example, women occupied 250 out of 818 stands in Benoni location, and a similar situation was developing on a slightly lesser scale elsewhere on the Reef.²⁷ In 1932 Brakpan location was allegedly ‘teeming with people – principally from Basutoland, who … have thrown up shacks all over the place and defied the authorities’.²⁸ Finally by 1935, in Springs, the ‘black female population was alleged to have substantially overtaken that of males’.²⁹ Other major consequences of this pattern of semi-autonomous female urbanisation was that it created a situation where massive sub-letting and equally massive illicit brewing of liquor could (and did) occur. Both were to prove nightmares for the white municipal administrations of Ekurhuleni.

Thus despite all official intentions to the opposite, the Ekurhuleni locations became ethnically mixed and also housed growing populations of African women – who not only raised children a much more unconditionally settled black urban population – but who were also found to be increasingly impossible to control. This hybridity, self-assertion, self-confidence and self-construction stamped itself indelibly on the cultures of these freewheeling locations. The cornerstones of this culture were women’s liquor brewing and selling, entertainment, music, sharing and lastly often unstable family relationships. The name given to this new urban culture was ‘marabi’.³⁰ This way of life is generally assumed to have originated and assumed shape in Johannesburg’s inner-city slums, yet there is evidence to suggest it was equally a child and a symbol of Ekurhuleni. As one of the first issues of the African newspaper Bantu World noted in April 1932, the origins of ‘a new style of dancing known as “marabi” could be “traced back to Benoni in the late 1920s”’. Then a man composed a dancing ditty ‘your ears are like the ears of a baboon’ in Zulu/Xhosa. A few people danced a new step to a strange tune. It became popular with the youth of the lower class. ‘Today’ the paper continued, ‘it is danced all over the Reef. The pianist plays it in harmony with the banjoists or violinist.’ The new music, the newspaper remarked, had turned ‘many parts of the Reef into a perfect pandemonium.’³¹ This we shall see in later chapters was certainly one way to describe Ekurhuleni’s urban society at the time.

POLITICAL AND CLASS STRUGGLE

Early mine compound

At more or less the same time that black populations in Ekurhuleni were being herded into the new locations, the political temperatures among the black communities of the area were on the rise. In 1910 the Act of Union had been passed, unifying the four formerly separate provinces of South Africa, which disenfranchised all Africans at central, provincial and local government level (outside the Cape). In response, the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) was launched in 1912, whose first (and only) major national campaign for the next 50 years was mounted against the Land Act of that year which denied Africans the right to own land in 92% of the Union.³² Thereafter, mainly due to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, which the SANNC loyally vowed to support, it sank back into a posture of political passivity. The campaign against the Land Act had been focused mainly in the countryside and reserves, and tapped into impressive chiefly support.³³ Meanwhile, however, in the towns, serious unrest was stirring which, for the course of the war (1914–1918), largely passed the SANNC by. Its site was the Witwatersrand, and especially the black workers on its mines. The first indications of the increasingly hostile mood of black miners came as white workers went on strike in June 1913. The following month on 8 and 9 July, 1 300 African workers followed suit. Part of the explanation for this action lies in the demonstration effect of the white strike. As one report noted:

‘Some had actually followed the lead [of the white strikers] … urging natives to strike and picketing and threatening those that did not comply.’³⁴

But the new mood also grew out of a deeper complex of problems – a 50% cut in wages since 1906, and the strangulating hold of a new web of regulations set in place by the Native Labour Regulations Act of 1911 which closed off most avenues of escape from or evasion of oppressive mine conditions (as, for example, deserting). As a direct consequence of the strike an unprecedented Native Grievances Enquiry was appointed which recommended a wide range of reforms (rations, medical facilities, working conditions, accommodation) but which did not address the fundamental issue of wages.³⁵ From 1915 unrest over wages once more began to stir and mounted steadily until the outbreak of the massive black mine workers’ strike of February 1920. In most of this the Ekurhuleni miners took the lead. On 26 December 1915, for example, a black workers’ strike broke out at Van Ryn Deep Mines, to be followed in early February 1916 by strikes at Government Areas South and New Modderfontein Mines. ‘The trouble,’ as a panicked Sub-Inspector of Police in Benoni wrote, ‘has been spreading from one compound to another; the natives are meeting, resort to picketing and are in fact organising as the [white] miners did in 1913 and 1914.’

In the latter years of the war the price of goods leapt upwards. Inflation accelerated especially rapidly in 1917, and Ekurhuleni was again the site of a major demonstration. This took the form of an exceptionally disciplined and well-organised stores boycott which exploded within 48 hours across the length and breadth of Ekurhuleni. Starting at Van Ryn Deep on 10 February 1918, it spread to Kleinfontein, Modderfontein, Modder, Geduld, Springs, Government Areas, Brakpan and then after a brief pause to Cason compound on the near East Rand. ‘Their organisation is perfect,’ a report in the Rand Daily Mail read, ‘What happens at one point, is known throughout the circuit very soon afterwards.’³⁶

Police action and the promise of a Commission of Enquiry brought the movement to a halt. Three months later the harsh treatment of striking bucket boys (i.e. night soil removers) in Johannesburg brought the Transvaal Native Congress (TNC) (the more radical Transvaal provincial wing of the SANNC) into the fray. Angry meetings were held all over the Rand, in which Ekurhuleni workers featured prominently, and preparations were undertaken to organise a strike.³⁷ Again Ekurhuleni workers were at the fore with one TNC militant being directed to canvass the idea in Springs, and another between Cleveland and Block B. The influenza epidemic of 1918 briefly drew the sting out of the agitation – out of 157 614 black miners working on the mines in the fateful month of October 1918, 52 489 were hospitalised and approximately 1 600 died – but a fundamental shift in both behaviour and mood was plain for all to see. What was particularly noticeable and significant at this point was the extent to which town locations and mine compounds were connecting and interacting especially via the agency of the TNC.³⁸ Storm clouds were mounting; thunderbolts were waiting to strike.

A core problem identified by both workers and the leaders of the TNC was the pass system which shackled workers to their jobs. As Benjamin Phooko, a clerk representing 5 000 City Deep workers explained: ‘Allowing prices to rise alarms us because we have entered contracts that cannot be broken, so as to demand a higher price for our labour.’

Another was its wage depressing function. As R.M. Tladi, a leading TNC radical from Benoni declared:

When a Native, after being forced to come out of his kraal, got to the Mines or the towns, the Pass Law forced him to get work as soon as possible. That is when the 6-day pass was instituted. When it expires the Native is afraid he may be arrested. He has not sufficient time to find more remunerative employment, and is perhaps forced to accept £1 or 30/- a month. The first white man who hires him gives him as little wages as possible because the unfortunate Native is forced by the Pass Law to take anything that is offered to him. His Pass is marked £1 or 30/- and thus his first employer is his valuator. He cannot get more’.³⁹

Yet another was the character column on passes. As H.S. Mgqano, another among Benoni’s nucleus of radicals told the Superintendent of Native Affairs Benoni:

A native works under a white man for 5 years or more. He by mere misfortune breaks a glass or any article in the house. His master gets annoyed and forgets this man worked for such a long time under him. He discharges him and on his character he writes ‘bad boy’. This character disables the man to obtain work anywhere and in some cases even if engaged by another white man, when registering him at the Pass Office seeing his character on the Pass the Pass Officer turns to the employer and states ‘I advise you not to take this boy’, then the man is stranded.⁴⁰

Finally the opportunity passes provided for harassment by police gave rise to another burning grievance. As R.M. Tladi again declared in a speech at a TNC meeting in May 1919:

The pass persecutes and disappoints you … In the first place when you meet a Policeman you’ll have to take off your hat and then produce your pass otherwise you will be knocked about and after all you will be arrested and charged for resisting or failing to satisfy the Police and you will be convicted accordingly.⁴¹

Meeting of ANC leaders in the 1920s

At the end of March black public patience broke. The TNC called for a collective refusal to carry passes. This was the first major anti-pass campaign to have been summoned in South Africa and counts as an epochal event. On 1 April thousands attended meetings in Johannesburg and hundreds handed in their passes. Pickets in white suburbs collected 2 000 more. At a meeting held late that day it was decided that delegates from Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Boksburg and Benoni were to secure the surrender of passes the following day and a cessation of work in those areas. On 2 April in the storm centre of Benoni, large crowds gathered at the police charge office; as a result 69 women and 49 men were arrested, to which the crowd responded by stoning the police. The next day 100 Africans returned carrying a sack of surrendered passes, upon which 67 arrests were made. On 4 April all available white constables were summoned to round up 20 male Africans who were travelling the district ‘spreading disaffection among the mine natives’. Similar episodes were reported first in Springs and then finally in Boksburg.⁴² Here a more ambiguous political climate prevailed. As early as February 1919 an agitation against passes had developed in this area, but had been largely stifled by the moderation of its TNC branch chairman Wessels Morake (who would stand at the head of a long line of Boksburg black elite conservatism). In April an ERPM clerk, J.G. Matshiqi, took the lead in the movement, however, and Morake’s restraint was swept aside after Matshiqi had summoned reinforcement from Johannesburg, Germiston and Benoni.

Police repression, a split in the leadership of the TNC and a range of minor concessions, again led black political leaders on the Rand to step back from the brink. However, neither they nor anyone else could gainsay or disguise one unrelenting reality and pressure – the ever-spiralling increase in prices with which wages dismally failed to keep up. The tide of resistance was about to break its banks. During December 1919 and January 1920 workers from Rose Deep and Knights Central in Germiston, from New Modder, Van Ryn East, Geduld, Welgedacht and Modder Deep in Benoni and from Simmer and Jack in Boksburg all at one point or another refused to work and registered protest over wages.⁴³ Then on 16 February 1920 two Zulu miners, named Mobu and Vilakazi, were arrested after attending a TNC meeting in Vrededorp (in Johannesburg). They had been moving from room to room on the Cason section of ERPM, and urging fellow workers to strike for higher pay. The following day the vast majority of workers in Cason Compound went on strike – 2 500 out of 2 900 men demanding their release and an increase in wages. With that the 1920 black mine workers’ strike formally began. From there the virus quickly spread to other parts of Ekurhuleni, thence to Johannesburg and finally to the West Rand. This was to be the most significant black worker and certainly black mine worker action for the next 60 years. When the strike finally ended on 28 February 1920, 71 000 African workers had been on strike with over 30 000 out on six consecutive days. Ekurhuleni was its detonator and fuse.⁴⁴

African men were regularly subjected to pass raids

Rapid deflation set in in 1921 and caused the agitation to subside. Widespread apathy now reigned among Africans on the Rand, reinforced by several other brutal acts of State repression elsewhere in South Africa. Particular acts of aggression include the assault on the Israelites in the Eastern Cape in 1921 and the bombing of the Bondelswarts rebels in South West Africa, and of the rebels of the Rand Strike in 1922. Political agitation staged a minor revival with the arrival of Clement Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICWU) late in 1925, but after one tour of Ekurhuleni, at which Kadalie spoke to many audiences in Germiston, Benoni, Boksburg and Springs, he and his lieutenants concentrated all ICU resources and meetings in Johannesburg. Ekurhuleni branches consequently stagnated, and despite giving a platform and political exposure to a number of rising political personalities such as Walter Ngqoyi in Benoni, Dinah Maile in Springs, Abel Phoofolo in Germiston and others in Boksburg, it slid into total obscurity in the area after 1927.⁴⁵

From then onwards Ekurhuleni’s politics wound down completely to the level of the local and the parochial. The consequent lack of national profile that these achieved has meant a number of major grass roots movements and initiatives which mobilised themselves in this period have been missed or ignored, leaving the late 1920s to the late 1930s being written off as ‘years of anguished impotence’.⁴⁶

The reality, as will be shown, was precisely the opposite and a series of fundamental challenges to municipal control were then spearheaded by Ekurhuleni black urban women. This is one of the subjects of the next chapter.

Black Ekurhuleni began to set down roots in the ‘mine locations’ which emerged on the Reef before and after the South African War of 1899–1902. Once Ekurhuleni’s towns acquired municipal status they took steps to control these mushrooming settlements and ultimately to establish formal locations. Two distinct features of these locations which defied the authorities’ original intention were their mixed African, Indian and coloured population, and the large numbers of African women they soon came to house. These helped fashion a new urban culture which went by the name of ‘marabi’. Between 1913 and 1920 intense popular and worker struggles swept through both mining and urban locations, among the most notable of which were the 1919 anti-pass campaign and the 1920 Black Workers’ Strike. Thereafter a number of factors led to the demobilisation of these movements, and politics in the various locations declined to the level of the purely parochial.